Nickel Boys

I started this book by Colson Whitehead some time back and decided I couldn't deal with the dark subject matter in the middle of a pandemic. Nevertheless, my book group selected it for the coming month's discussion, so this time I pushed through to the end. Of course Whitehead writes so well that reading it is easy in one sense, although one of my fellow book groupies complained about the abundant jargon. But it is a dark subject, based on an actual Florida school, the Dozier School for Boys, that was in operation for over 100 years, inflicting horrific psychological and physical injuries--including death--on thousands of children. 

The protagonist for most of the book is Elwood Curtis, abandoned by his parents, but taken in and nurtured by his grandmother in 1960's Tallahassee, Florida. He works hard from childhood on, both at school and to earn money after school, and has absorbed the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. by listening to his speeches on a phonograph record. When a high school teacher recognizes his intelligence and determination, Elwood is set to start college classes at a nearby high school. But as he is hitch hiking to his first day of classes, he takes a ride in a fancy car with a black man who is stopped minutes later for car theft. Although the driver backs up Elwood's claim of innocence. Elwood is arrested and sent to the so called Nickel Academy which is supposed to provide "physical, intellectual, and moral training" for delinquent boys. It is in fact a holding pen and money maker for administrators and teachers who love to inflict pain and make money by selling off the black children's food supplies and employing them in grueling labor. When Elwood tries to defend a boy being picked on by two bullies, he receives a beating that leaves him hospitalized for weeks. After that, he learns to fly under the radar with the help of his friend Turner. 

We fast forward about midway in the book to New York City, a decade or so later, to find that Elwood supposedly escaped and has now managed to work his way up an an employee at a moving company and eventually starts a moving company of his own. What we learn in the end, however, is that Elwood never made it out of the Nickel Academy in his mind or his body. The book is a blistering indictment of the systemic and systematic abuses heaped upon African Americans since we brought them to America as slaves. Obviously this is a timely read given the recent high profiles police killings of black Americans and the re-energizing of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The reviews are uniformly glowing.

The New York Times provides a lengthy description of the plot as well as cogent commentary on the significance of the book's topic. 

The Guardian calls this book "essential" reading. 

The Washington Post notes that Whitehead has abandoned all the "surreal insertions" that characterized his Pulitzer Prize winning Underground Railroad. This book is instead "restrained" and "transparent," it's "groundedness...perhaps, an implicit admission that the treatment of African Americans has been so bizarre and grotesque that fantastical enhancements are unnecessary."

The Golden Cage

Prolific writer of psychological thrillers, Camilla Lackberg is a new author for me. She might better have titled this book Revenge for it spends the first half of the book making the case for why the protagonist Faye so elaborately executes in the second half of the book.

We are constantly getting dark hints about Faye's upbringing in a small town as the daughter of a poor family. We learn her brother committed suicide, her mother is dead, and her father is in jail. She can't get out of town fast enough when her father goes to jail. She heads to the place she's always dreamed of, Stockholm, and proceeds to leave her past behind, or does she. She gets into the prestigious Stockholm School of Economics, where she excels. But when she meets and then marries her exact opposite, a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth, she drops out of school to support him and a friend in starting their own business. With Faye's excellent guidance, the business grows beyond their wildest imagining they become wealthy and then become parents of a daughter. But husband Jack becomes increasingly distant, shutting Faye out of all involvement with the business. And then she comes home unexpectedly to find him with another woman. In spite of her seminal role in the business's success, he cuts her off without a penny. 

You'll probably begin to guess how things turn out early on, but won't know the full extent of Faye's machinations until the very end. The Washington Post notes, "the lure of The Golden Cage lies in the moral ambiguity of its heroine..."  Reviewer Maureen Corrigan goes on to observe that Lackberg's prose, at least in translation, is not particularly elegant. And, in fact, I often found her writing, even of the sex scenes, boring. But you will certainly want to find out how Faye gets payback. The New York Times offers a favorable review with more detail about plot and character. Kirkus calls this "A deliciously inventive thriller brimming with sex, secrets, and scandal." And Publishers' Weekly gushes, "The poignant insights into women’s capacity for self-sacrifice, multidimensional characterizations, and celebration of female ingenuity will resonate with many. Läckberg reinforces her position as the thriller queen of Scandinavia." I wouldn't turn down another of her books if offered, but I wouldn't bother seeking one out either, so I guess that puts me in the minority.

Migrations

“The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here.” So opens Charlotte McConaghy's debut adult novel, set in the near distant future. Our protagonist and narrator is a woman trying to make sense of a world gone mad and of her own self-destructive compulsion to wander. Abandoned early on by her father,  Franny Stone in turn abandons her mother when she wanders off at the age of 12. When she returns home, her mother is gone. Franny loves the wild spaces and the creatures that inhabit them, especially the birds and creatures of the sea. Over the years, as multiple species are driven to extinction by human greed, she undertakes one last migration of her own, to follow the only remaining flock of Arctic terns on their monumental annual journey from Greenland to Antarctica. She tags three birds during nesting season and then has to convince one of the disappearing number of fishing boats to take her south. She badgers Ennis Malone, captain of the Saghani, to take her onboard, against his better judgement and the opinion of his eccentric crew.  Franny promises that following the terns will lead them to the "Golden Catch" that has eluded them these last few years.

Franny's tortured history is revealed in flashback chapters and in her unsent letters to her ecology activist husband, Niall. But her obsession, now shared by Ennis, may be the undoing of them all. 

The book is rich in metaphor. For example, as The Guardian notes with regard to the terns' migration, "This journey is the longest migration undertaken by any animal – a complete crossing of the globe – and a feat that terns complete twice-yearly. The book uses this act of endurance, this instinctual movement, metaphorically: Franny too is driven to constant movement by forces she cannot control or understand, and is determined and driven even in the face of great adversity." They also comment on the thing I found most distracting,  the "book’s constant shuttling about in time, as well as the unreliability of Franny’s narration, the half-truths and silences with which she surrounds herself and everything she holds back from the other characters and the reader alike." If I were to re-read the book, I would keep a timeline of Franny's life on paper.

The New York Times chides that the novel veers into melodrama in the last half, but also concurs with my sense of how beautifully this book is written when they say, "this novel’s prose soars with its transporting descriptions of the planet’s landscapes and their dwindling inhabitants, and contains many wonderful meditations on our responsibilities to our earthly housemates."

 The Washington Post concludes, "In many ways, this is a story about grieving, an intimate tale of anguish set against the incalculable bereavements of climate change. There are many losses, but lives are also saved. Franny charts our course through a novel that is efficient and exciting, indicting but forgiving, and hard but ultimately hopeful."

 

Memory Man

I'm sure I must have read something by prolific bestselling author David Baldacci before, but don't seem to have posted anything. This book introduces a new series featuring Amos Decker. Decker still lives in Burlington, Vermont, where he was a star on the high school football team...the only one to ever get the chance to go pro. On his first outing as an NFL rookie, however, he is so savagely struck by an opponent's helmet that he loses consciousness, suffers several broken bones, and wakes up with a different brain. The trauma has caused him to remember every detail of anything he hears, sees, or experiences (hyperthymesia) and  to see colored numbers connected to certain events (synesthesia), becoming what is called an acquired savant. He goes to an institute that studies such mental anomalies as a way to help himself cope with his altered brain. Eventually he returns to Burlington, joins the police force and puts his perfect memory to work solving crimes as a detective. 

But then his world is knocked off its axis once again when he comes home one night to find his brother-in-law, his wife, and his daughter all brutally murdered. The killer is never found. And Decker cannot forget a single detail of what he saw, so he starts drinking to try and forget, which shortly ends his police career, and ultimately he becomes homeless. A year and half later, he has pulled himself together sufficiently to start taking on small jobs as a private investigator and earns enough to live in the Residence Inn. Seemingly out of the blue, a man walks into the police station and claims to be responsible for the murders of Decker's family, claiming that Decker disrespected him in a grocery store encounter. But Decker has no memory of the man. Then a horrific mass shooting occurs at the local high school and clues start to connect the earlier murders to the current perpetrator. Decker is brought in, first by the local police and then by the FBI, to try and help solve the crimes. Decker hooks back up with his former partner at the police department, veteran detective Mary Lancaster, and, against his better judgement, with a local newspaper reporter. However, everyone who comes close to Decker becomes a target for the killer; it's clear this is very personal. It's just that Decker cannot remember anyone he pissed off so badly that they would undertake such savage revenge. This book will keep you guessing until the end.

The Washington Post calls "this novel a master class on the bestseller because of its fast-moving narrative, the originality of its hero and its irresistible plot." Kirkus concludes that "Although the crimes and their perpetrators are far-fetched, readers will want to see Decker back on the printed page again and again."

American Spy

This debut novel by Lauren Wilkinson "was a Washington Post bestseller, an NAACP Image Award nominee, an Anthony award nominee, and an Edgar Award nominee. It was short-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, was a Barnes & Noble Book of the Month, a PBS book club pick, and was included on Barack Obama’s 2019 Recommended Reading List" (author website). NPR says,  "American Spy works on so many levels — it's an expertly written spy thriller as well as a deeply intelligent literary novel that tackles issues of politics, race and gender in a way that's never even close to being heavy-handed or didactic."  They go on to say that "Wilkinson doesn't shy away from the moral ambiguity of American adventurism in the 1980s, and neither does her unforgettable narrator, Marie, who tells her sons, 'One thing I can say for sure is that I don't want you to be moral absolutists. If what I'm telling you of our story means to you that the people it involves are either saved or damned, then you'll have misunderstood me.'"

The year is 1992, and it's the middle of the night when Marie Mitchell is alerted by an ominous floorboard creaking in her rural Connecticut home; she retrieves her gun from the safe under her desk and silently awaits the man who has come to kill her. In the struggle, she shoots him instead and, with her young twin sons in tow,  flees to the sanctuary of her mother's small farm on a Caribbean island. Here's the backstory that is gradually revealed in the book, as summarized by Kirkus:

"It’s 1987, and Marie Mitchell has hit the wall as an FBI agent. She’s patronized and marginalized by her boss, who relegates her to little more than recruiting informants (or “snitches,” as she derisively calls them) and filing “oppressive amounts of paperwork.” This is not how this idealistic (but hardly naïve) daughter of an NYPD officer hoped her life would turn out back when she and her sister, Helene, dreamed of becoming secret agents when they grew up. At this low point of her professional life, Marie is recruited by Ed Ross, a smooth-talking CIA official, to take part in a covert operation to undermine the regime of Burkina Faso’s magnetic young president, Thomas Sankara, a Marxist influenced by the example of the martyred revolutionary Che Guevara. From the beginning of her assignment, Marie is both wary of the agency’s reasons for taking down Sankara and skeptical toward Sankara’s leftist politics, though the closer she gets to Sankara, the less inclined she is to dismiss his efforts to improve his nation’s welfare. Nevertheless, Marie has another, more personal motive for accepting the assignment: the agent-in-charge, Daniel Slater, was both a colleague and lover of her sister, who fulfilled her ambition to become a spy but died in a car accident whose circumstances remain a mystery to Marie and her family. The more embedded Marie gets in her assignment, the less certain she is of what that assignment entails and of who, or what, she’s really working for. Falling in love with her target—Sankara, who in real life was violently overthrown that same year—is yet another complication that further loosens Marie’s professional resolve." Kirkus goes on to conclude by saying, "There’s an honorable, unsung tradition of African-American novelists using the counterspy genre as a metaphor for what W.E.B. Du Bois called "double consciousness," and Wilkinson’s book is a noteworthy contribution." Or as The Nation puts it, "Wilkinson does not graft the matter of race onto the spy novel but rather asks us to think about how being a minority is, in a sense, an act of espionage, a precarious state marked by shifting identities, competing loyalties, and a constant threat of violence." And the Washington Post notes, "...also striking is the novel’s deeper recognition that, to some extent, rudimentary tradecraft is something all of her African American characters have learned as an everyday survival skill. As Marie’s father wryly tells her on the day of her graduation from the FBI training academy at Quantico, “I’ve been a spy in this country for as long as I can remember.”

Part of the twisty tale leads us down Marie's path of discovery about who is really pulling the strings. Much of the book allows us inside Marie's mind and feelings as the story is largely told in a long letter to her two sons--"I'm writing this to give you honest answers to the questions I hazard to guess you'll ask while you're growing up. I'm writing it all down here just in case I'm not around to tell you."Their parentage, when revealed, will not surprise, but the ending will leave you hanging, not in an unpleasant way, but certainly with a sense of loss about not knowing the outcome.

High praise for the book abounds including The New York Journal of Books,  The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, and The Nation. The Nation's review offers the most comprehensive discussion of race vis a vis national and global politics.

The Dutch House

Ann Patchett doesn't need any introduction from me, having already written several highly acclaimed books. But, what you may not know is that she also owns an independent bookstore in Nashville, TN (Parnassus Books) and is an activist for independent bookstores. Yay!

In their younger years, Maeve and Danny Conroy lived in the titular Dutch House, a mansion outside Philadelphia that their father bought at auction in 1946, completely furnished, as a surprise for his wife. Unfortunately, his wife, Elna, hated the house and walked away when Maeve was 10, Danny was 3. Ostensibly she went to India to work with the poor; they haven't heard from her since. Their father managed with the help of housekeeper, cook and nanny for a time until a young widow, Andrea--18 years Cyril Conroy's junior--gets her heart set on living in the house.  She has two younger daughters in tow and as soon as she moves in, things begin to change--and not for the better, in Maeve and Danny's opinion. When Maeve goes to college, Andrea moves her belongings to an attic bedroom and moves her older daughter into the room. Maeve never comes back to the Dutch House after that. When Cyril Conroy unexpectedly dies of a heart attack, Maeve and Danny are dismayed to find that Andrea has convinced her husband to put her name on all of the business and personal assets; Maeve and Danny inherit nothing. She kicks Danny out of the house and they are left penniless. Maeve is already working as a bookkeeper and living in a one bedroom flat in a nearby town. The lawyer does say that there is an educational trust that will cover Danny's education and Maeve is determined to take every penny she can for Danny. So he is sent off to an expensive boarding school (Choate) and when he finishes, she makes sure he gets into Columbia and then into Columbia med school. Danny honors Maeves wishes because she is all he has, even though he has no interest in being a doctor and really just wants to follow in his father's footsteps, buying and fixing up old buildings. Maeve remains fixated on The Dutch House, driving over to sit out front in her car every time Danny comes home from school for a visit, and even long after. Danny seems to get on with his life as he wants it after he finally finishes his residency. He gets married, has kids, buys up and renovates old buildings. When Maeve suffers a heart attack, their mother makes an appearance and, surprisingly to Danny, Maeve accepts her into her life. That is, until Andrea seems to need Elna more.  Complicated relationships and obsessions characterize every aspect of this book. Ann Patchett said in an interview with The Guardian in 2016 that "I’ve been writing the same book my whole life — that you’re in one family, and all of a sudden, you’re in another family and it’s not your choice and you can’t get out.” That pretty well sums up this situation here, as well.

Glowing reviews from NPR,  The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Kirkus.

Stranger in the Lake

I was not familiar with any of Kimberly Belle's earlier works, but this was a well done thriller that kept me engaged throughout. Charlotte (nee Charlie) was born to a mother so addicted to drugs that nothing else mattered, including food for her children. Young Charlie was often left to care for an always hungry infant brother. But she escapes the trailer park and eventually falls in love with and marries an older man, Paul Keller, an architect to the rich who like to build their second homes in the tourist town of Lake Crosby, NC. Now Charlotte (after legally changing her name) works at Paul's company as a client relations manager, and lives with him in his beautiful house overlooking the lake. She feels lucky never to have to worry about being hungry or cold, again. She chooses to ignore the small town rumors that Paul was somehow complicit in the drowning of his first wife. But when a woman Charlotte had seen Paul talking to in town turns up dead and floating under their lakeside dock, Charlotte begins to wonder if she has been blind. Then Paul disappears for 2 days while the investigators, including Micah, underwater retrieval expert, son of the police chief, and Paul's best friend, scour for clues as to the woman's identity and what she was doing in town. Charlotte initially lies to the police about having ever seen the woman and backs up Paul's assertion that he'd never met her. But as Charlotte digs deeper, she find that Paul and his two best friends have all been keeping a dark secret for decades that the dead woman was about to bring into the light. All three have a motive, but who would be willing to kill to keep the secret. Not a conventional happy ending, but a strong female protagonist and some great plot twists will make this a worthwhile diversion. Review available from Publishers' Weekly.

Chosen Ones

Author Veronica Roth is probably best known for her Divergent series of YA books, which were all made into movies. This book also does a great job of world building but started out so slowly that it wasn't until Part II that I really got engaged. I would agree with Publishers Weekly that the frequent and distracting "inclusion of news reports and government documents initially slow the pace." In Part I, we meet five adults, who, based upon a prophecy, were chosen in their teens to defeat The Dark One. All are still friends and are periodically called in by the governmental powers that be to consult on magical anomalies in the world. But that same government entity wants to control magic and therefore seeks to create some as well, which results in the death of one of the Chosen Ones, Albert. On the 10th anniversary of the defeat of The Dark One, three of the Chosen Ones are pulled into a parallel universe where dark forces are still wreaking havoc and told they must find a way to defeat them or risk their own world, Earth, also being destroyed. Part II is set in this version of Chicago and the United States where magic has been such a pervasive part of everyone's life that fashion accessories are worn to help the general populace work everyday magical events like opening doors by whistling. There are some, like the official who summoned the Chosen Ones, who are clearly stronger in magic than others, and appearances can be deceptive; deciding who to trust divides the three friends from each other when they will absolutely need to work as a team to preserve this different world as well as their home. The narrator is Sloan Andrews, who has hidden dark secrets from her fellow Chosen Ones about how she came to control and then destroy a magical relic she used to help defeat The Dark One. She still suffers from PTSD and chafes at the constant recognition and media attention that results from her celebrity as one of Earth's saviors. Although Sloane's character continues to develop throughout the book, the New York Times rightly notes that, for the other Chosen Ones, "...the characters we were starting to care about [in Part I] are put to one side [in Part II] along with Sloane’s relationships with them; new ones are quickly pushed into a prominence that feels unearned, especially after the slow build of the first half of the book." As Kirkus points out, though, Roth does a good job of addressing the question, "What happens to heroes after they save the world?"

Dying in the Wool

This is the first of a cozy mystery series by Frances Brody (pseudonym for Frances McNeil), set in post WWI England, and featuring protagonist Kate Shackleton. Kate received news that her husband was missing in action and has never been able to accept that he is truly gone. Like other women widowed by the war, she keeps searching, and has informally helped several women locate missing family members. When an acquaintance of Kate's from her VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) days writes and offers to pay Kate for her skills, Kate hesitates. It's one thing to help someone find a missing lover, brother, husband as an act of kindness, but quite another to consider taking money, which would make her more of a professional. Her father is a police inspector and so Kate's inquisitiveness and persistence have been encouraged. When he finds out that Kate might take a paying job with a very short deadline, he suggests she partner up with a former policeman who was never politically savvy enough to get very far--enter Jim Sykes. Jim can go where Kate often cannot and pretend to be people who Kate could not, so they make a good pair. Kate is an independent young woman, who continues to live in the house she shared with her Army surgeon husband, Gerald Shackleton. She drives a motor car--a Jowett --and decides her new partner needs to learn to drive as well.

Kate's first professional client, Tabitha Braithwaite, wants Kate to find her father who disappeared 2 years ago, and do it before Tabitha gets married in just 5 weeks. Tabitha's mother--and pretty much everyone else--think that millionaire textile mogul Joshua Braithwaite is dead.  When he was found battered and bruised in a stream a few days before disappearing, he was charged with attempted suicide--supposedly as a result of recently losing his son at the Somme--and incarcerated in a mental hospital. He escaped from there and was never seen again. But everyone Kate questions about the disappearance is holding back important information. Nevertheless, Kate uncovers enough clues to begin suspecting that he may have run away and started a new life. The mill is still being profitably run by Braithwaite's family--his wife and daughter and a cousin. Two murders at the mill, staged to look like accidents, suggest the possibility of foul play in Braithwaite's disappearance. And Kate may be next on the list of loose threads to tie up.

If you are a fan of the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear, you will like this protagonist and this series. Kirkus says of this initial outing that it "introduces a refreshingly complex heroine and adds a fine feeling for the postwar period." Publishers Weekly is a bit more measured in their review.

Certain Dark Things

In this 2nd stand-alone novel by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, near-future Mexico, like much of the rest of the world, is plagued by various tribes of vampires. Mexico City is the exception, where vampires are forbidden and cops ruthlessly seek them out for destruction. Atl, a member of an ancient Aztec- affiliated species of vampires, has nevertheless come to Mexico City for help. Atl is being pursued by the scion of a competing band of ruthless vampires who have already wiped out the rest of her family and intend the same for her. Atl lucks out, unwittingly, when she meets 17-year-old Domingo, a trash picker who lives on the streets or in the underground tunnels of the city, but can sell enough of what he finds to the recyclers to keep himself fed. He is a voracious reader of vampire stories in comic books and is totally smitten with Atl when they first meet and offers to help in any way he can, including--of course--as an occasional food source. Atl has come to Mexico City to get in touch with very old friends of her mother's who, using their networks of document forgers and human traffickers, may be able to help her get out of the country and stay alive. But her pursuers are leaving a trail of bodies across the city and drawing unwanted attention from the police, including a detective, Ana Aguirre, who has killed her fair share of vampires while working for a regional police department  outside the city. When Ana's suspicions are aroused that the deaths are vampire related, she gets no support from her misogynistic colleagues and reluctantly turns to a gang of drug dealers for help in locating the vampires.

Atl is an anti-heroine of the first order; you will come to root for her as she transitions from spoiled daughter of a wealthy family to grieving solo fugitive. She is conflicted between a tough and uncaring posture that is heredity and habit, and an inability to follow through on her overwhelming hunger in relationship with naive Domingo.

Although I gave up on another of Moreno-Garcia's books, Gods of Jade and Shadow, I really enjoyed this book. There is rich description of Mexico, some mythology, a little Aztec history, fully developed characters, and a post-text glossary of vampire species you never knew existed. Lots of rave reviews about this book including NPR, who calls it a "compelling new take on vampires;" Publishers Weekly; and The New York Journal of Books which concludes its review with this high praise:

"Filled with powerful themes of trust, corruption, vengeance, and bloodlust, this novel is by turns sensual and grim, introspective and disturbing, suspenseful and moving, and all told in the sleek and lyrical prose for which Moreno-Garcia is deservedly acclaimed. In short, Certain Dark Things is arguably the vampire novel for the 21st century."